B2B customers’ expectations are higher than ever and selling channels continue to increase in number and complexity. Sales teams are fighting Ecommerce for relevance, channel conflict threatens decades-old relationships, and new entrants such as Amazon Business represent both opportunities and challenges to manufacturers and distributors.
You have enough to contend with, does your eCommerce platform need to add to the complexity? Or is a complicated infrastructure just a fact of life for the modern, digitally-transformed B2B enterprise?
Team Business
Kari Fauber, Director of the Global Partner Organization and eCommerce at Keysight Technologies
Greg Lord, Vice President of Marketing at Elastic Path
Team IT
Ben Lichtenwalner, Director, eCommerce at Etna Distributors
Ali Alkhafaji, President at TA Digital
KEY TAKEAWAYS
Proofs of Concept (POCs) have value, but can also slow you down: One of the biggest benefits of POCs is that they mitigate risk to the business. Rather than launching a big bang, complex project you can show value in far less time. As Ben Lichtenwalner said, “We’ve all had the one project where we’ve been sold a bill of goods by a vendor and it doesn’t meet our needs. A POC helps us mitigate risk as early as possible.” Greg Lord echoed the need to mitigate risk, but called out the (sorry) risks of taking that approach: “Have you engaged with the right experts on the strategy? Have you thought through the staffing model? And the process changes? It’s not just about picking a new platform for an MVP. You have to think holistically and think about the risk profile of the business.”
The customer journey has to drive your product development. Kari Fauber noted that when they were doing their strategic planning, they looked at the customer journey because “the customer has to be first.” The buying journey differs for different customer groups, so they mapped functionality to meet the needs of each group for their particular journey.
Don’t let the vendor drive your technology decisions. There are more than 20 eCommerce platform vendors now. If you don’t understand the unique needs of your business, you won’t understand how a vendor can meet those needs. You have to do that homework on your customers. If you don’t, you risk choosing a vendor who cannot meet the specific needs you have for your customer base. Ali Alkhafaji had good things to say about Shopify, but only for companies that have very short-term eCommerce needs. Typically, he said, B2B companies have more complex, longer-term needs and will require IT’s help to build for the long-term.
eCommerce practitioners must build relationships with their CFO. We’ve heard more conversations about moving away from capitalizing eCommerce technology expenses and instead categorizing them as operating expenses. Every company is different, but the contenders discussed the importance of building a relationship with your CFO so you are making financial decisions in-line with the needs of your business. Fauber said that they look at eCommerce spending as a 3-5 year plan that we capitalize. They do an ROI analysis for every type of capital expenditure, but then they measure on P&L – orders, profits, earnings per share.
The IT group really can help with cost and time budgeting. A number of the contenders said that one of the issues they see repeatedly is the business team making a business case that ultimately doesn’t reflect the total costs, complexity and time of building new technology. Alkhafaji added, “There’s nothing wrong with measuring, but if I had a penny for every time a business handed my IT group an arbitrary budget that didn’t reflect reality, I’d be a millionaire.” And when a business team comes to his IT team suggesting cuts to make an earlier launch date, he said that they end up paying for it down the road with technical debt and maintenance. As Ben said, “At the end of the day, it comes down to IT knowing the systems. That’s what IT does all along. IT is the right group to do the cost analysis.”
Take time to understand what differentiates your business before you make tech decisions. Ben was adamant that, “you have to identify what differentiates you from your competitors – not just online, but the whole business. We pride ourselves on our relationships with customers and one of our challenges was bringing those relationships online. We couldn’t just buy something off the shelf, because it was a core differentiator of our business.” While Brian suggested that platforms’ app marketplaces may be a solution to adding flexibility to your platform, Greg disagreed, saying that “one big trap is that prospects see the big app marketplace and think that they’ll just be covered there. But the secret is that the app marketplace offerings are for the lowest common denominator functionality. But once you have more unique requirements, it gets really messy.”